Most WordPress sites that recommend products and services never tell you how they arrived at their recommendation, because it’s not based on serious tests or comparisons. It’s because everyone else recommends the same thing and/or the commission for referral is unusually high.
The short version
- Every tutorial here describes something we did ourselves, on a real WordPress website, before we made it into a lesson.
- The site you’re reading this on is the test bed. Its entire stack is published on our Tools & Resources page, so you can check what we’re actually running.
- We don’t have roundups or “best of” rankings yet, because we haven’t done the testing those require.
- When we’re wrong, we fix it publicly.
Who “we” really is
One person: Paul Goddin. I write everything here with the help of AI to organize content.
That’s worth saying plainly, because “we tested 14 plugins” on a one-person site usually means nobody tested anything. A small operation can be honest about its size or it can borrow the voice of a large one, and the second option is how most of this industry ended up untrustworthy.
I’m not a WordPress developer. I came to this as someone who kept hitting problems, solving them slowly, and noticing that the explanations available assumed knowledge I didn’t have. That’s the gap this site is for. It also means when something here is hard-won rather than obvious, it’s because it was hard-won for me first.
Where we test
On this site.
WP4Newbies runs on ordinary shared hosting — the same tier a beginner would buy, not a managed plan with a support team behind it. That’s deliberate. Advice written on infrastructure you’d never pay for is advice you can’t use.
The full stack is on the Tools & Resources page: the host, the theme, every plugin, and every outside service. It’s published so that any claim here can be checked against what’s really installed, and it’s re-verified against the live site rather than remembered.
So when a tutorial says a setting is in a particular place, it’s because it was in that place on a real install, recently, with the versions listed on that page.
How a tutorial gets written
Most of what’s here started as a problem on this site rather than as a topic on a list.
- Something breaks, or needs doing. Email stops arriving. A URL change leaves every page 404ing. A domain needs pointing at a new install.
- It gets fixed, slowly, with the wrong turns included. This is the part that becomes the article — not the clean five-step version reconstructed afterwards, but the route that actually worked and the two that didn’t.
- The fix gets repeated from the beginning. Solving something once teaches you the solution. Doing it again from a cold start is what surfaces the step you did without noticing, which is reliably the step a reader gets stuck on.
- Screenshots come from the real screen, at the moment the step happens, on the versions named in the post.
- Then it’s written for someone who doesn’t already know. Concept first, steps second. If a step needs a term the reader hasn’t met, the term gets explained before the step, not after.
What has to be true before a post goes live
Every post is checked against the same list:
- Every step was performed on a real install, by me, not described from documentation.
- Screenshots are current and match the version named in the post.
- No invented statistics, no unattributed numbers, no quotes nobody said. A number without a source and a date doesn’t go in.
- If a claim is about how something behaves, it was observed behaving that way — not assumed from how it ought to work.
- Anything not verified is cut, not softened. “Should work” is not a sentence on this site.
- Any affiliate link is disclosed where you’ll see it before you click.
That last one has teeth: if a post can’t carry a disclosure, the link doesn’t go in.
What we haven’t done yet
This site is new, and there are things it hasn’t earned the right to tell you.
We have no roundups, and no “best of” rankings. Not one. The reason is that a real roundup means installing every product, using each one properly, and breaking a few — and until that has happened, the honest version of “the 7 best backup plugins” is a list assembled from other people’s lists. That’s the most-produced and least-useful genre in WordPress publishing, and it’s most of what you’ll find when you search for it.
We have no product reviews. Same reason.
When those arrive, they’ll say how long each product was used, what it was used for, what went wrong, and what would make us stop recommending it. Until then, the tutorials here recommend tools only in the context of doing a specific job with them — which is a much narrower claim, and one we can actually stand behind.
When we get it wrong
We will, and we have.
Corrections are made on the page itself, dated, and described — not quietly edited out. If a fix changes the advice rather than just the wording, the post says what it used to say and why that was wrong. An article that silently changes underneath you is worse than one that was wrong openly, because you can’t tell which version you acted on.
If something here is wrong, out of date, or just doesn’t work on your setup, tell us: email us at [email protected] or via the Contact page. Corrections from readers are the cheapest quality control there is, and the fastest.
How money fits in
WP4Newbies is funded partly by affiliate commissions. Our Affiliate Disclosure lists every program we belong to.
Three rules govern it:
Recommendations come first, programmes second. We pick what to use, then find out whether there’s a programme — never the reverse. Most of what we run is free and pays us nothing at all, which is visible on the Tools & Resources page.
Disclosure is where you’ll see it, at the top of any post containing an affiliate link, not buried in a footer.
A commission never changes a verdict. The bet this site is making is that honest recommendations earn more readers over time than profitable ones earn commission. If that turns out to be wrong, we’d rather be wrong and small than right and untrustworthy.
What we won’t do
- Recommend something we haven’t used.
- Build a comparison table out of other people’s comparison tables.
- Use a vendor’s marketing screenshots in place of our own.
- Publish a number without a source and a date.
- Describe a feature we haven’t opened.
- Keep a recommendation because it pays well.
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